mped on just as if they were a
man's!" sighed Mrs. Rangeley. Her opponent laughed a generous delight,
as if he liked nothing better than having his reasoning brought to
naught. He entered joyously into the tumult which the utterance of the
different opinions, prejudices and prepossessions of the company
became.

Ludlow escaped from it, and made his way to Mrs. Westley, in that
remoter and quieter corner, which she seemed to find everywhere when
you saw her out of her own house; there she was necessarily prominent.

"I think Mr. Agnew is right, and Mrs. Rangeley is altogether wrong,"
she said. "There couldn't be a better illustration of it than in those
two young art-student friends of yours. Miss Saunders is beautiful in
just that absolute way Mr. Agnew speaks of; you simply can't refuse to
see it; and Miss Maybough is fascinating, if you feel her so. I should
think you'd find her very difficult to paint, and with Miss Saunders
there, all the time, I should be afraid of getting her decided
qualities into my picture."

Ludlow said, "Ah, that's very interesting."

He meant to outstay the rest, for he wished to speak with Wetmore
alone, and it seemed as though those people would never go. They went
at last. Mrs. Wetmore herself went off to the domestic quarter of the
apartment, and left the two men together.

"'Baccy?" asked Wetmore, with a hospitable gesture toward the pipes on
his mantel.

"No, thank you," said Ludlow.

"Well?"

"Wetmore, what was it you saw in my picture today, when you began with
that 'Hello' of yours, and then broke off to say something else?"

"Did I do that? Well, if you really wish to know----"

"I do!"

"I'll tell you. I was going to ask you which of those two girls you had
painted it from. The topography was the topography of Miss Maybough,
but the landscape was the landscape of Miss Saunders." He waited, as if
for Ludlow to speak; then he went on: "I supposed you had been working
from some new theory of yours, and I thought I had said about as much
on your theories as you would stand for the time."

"Was that all?" Ludlow asked.

"All? It seems to me that's a good deal to be compressed into one small
'hello.'"

Wetmore lighted a pipe, and began to smoke in great comfort. "We were
talking, just before you dropped in, of what you may call the psychical
chemistry of our kind of shop: the way a fellow transmutes himself into
everything he does. I can trace the man himself in every